Major Scott Malone stood in a sandbagged, open-sided hut on a windswept hill. His voice, amplified by a tinny speaker, carried over his audience of children and mothers toward two new United States-built classrooms by a basketball court.

Last September, two American soldiers died here in a roadside bombing. The incident, the deadliest in an eight-year US deployment in the southern Philippines, put a temporary stop to infrastructure projects across the war-torn island of Jolo, a key battleground in a US-backed military campaign.

Recalling these setbacks, Malone assured his audience that nothing would sway his forces from their mission. “We will not give up on the children of Kagay. Your children and their future are too important,” he said, before cutting a red ribbon at the school gate.

Kagay’s new school is a window into the perils of counterinsurgency in lawless areas like Jolo, a rugged outpost of Islam in Southeast Asia. A century ago, it was a center of fierce resistance to US occupation. More recently, it has become a byword for terrorism at the hands of the Abu Sayyaf, an Islamist group with historic ties to Al Qaeda that drew US Special Forces here in 2002 to advise and equip the Philippine military.